Pushing the limits of the laws of gravity year by year extreme sports athletes try to expand the trick horizon with every contest they enter. Skaters and bikers are constantly breaking new boundaries, setting new records and evolving what seems like daily the flips, grinds and spins we see on televised events like the X-Games and the Vans Triple Crown.
- Photo Department
Bringing the stunts to the public is skateboarding guru Tony Hawk. Hawk has created the “Boom Boom HuckJam”, an extreme sports tour traveling through the U.S. packed with boarders, bikers, moto-cross riders, and a DJ. The tour will hit Michigan on Tuesday, July 19th when it rolls through the Palace of Auburn Hills.
Combining music and jaw dropping tricks from several niches of extreme sports, the tour caters to a wide public, not just the followers of skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. Joining up for the tour are fellow professional vert riders Andy MacDonald and Bucky Lasek, as well as bmx bikers Mat Hoffman and Kevin Robinson, Moto-cross riders Drake McElroy and Ronnie Faisst, and many more.
With the ever-expanding fan-base, the Boom Boom HuckJam tour was founded as a result of shows breaking capacity and people being turned away. Doing an arena tour gives capacity a serious boost when compared to the bleachers that surround halfpipes at much smaller events.
Boasting larger ramps on this year’s tour, that only means one thing, bigger and more aggressive tricks. The 13 1/2 foot high, 50 foot across and 72 foot long halfpipe is the centerpiece of the spectacle to be used by the skaters and bikers, but not to be left out of the fun, the moto-cross riders will be jumping over the entire ramp.
The draw to a show like this is its inescapability to be different night after night. Riders can�t always just repeat their same runs of tricks every night of the tour, so they�re going to be varying it up. One night�s show could completely differ from the next.
Even in his “senior” years of skateboarding the Hawk name is still at the top of his game. Already retired from competition, in 2004 alone between video game sales, DVDs, merchandise and touring, Hawk grossed over $300 million. This number excludes commercial product endorsements. This proves to show just how far along extreme sports have come, and that this tour could be the leader of a new revolution.